The third instalment of Donald Akenson's trilogy of works exploring the radical evangelical cultures of early-nineteenth-century Ireland sets out to demonstrate their contribution to the re-shaping of American Protestantism in the early twentieth century. Akenson's two earlier works in this series explored the personal and ecclesiastical networks that sustained the ‘Second Reformation’ and the secession movements that pushed their way out of the Church of Ireland. Focusing in particular upon the career of John Nelson Darby and the so-called ‘Plymouth Brethren’, Akenson reconstructed the associations and aspirations that drew these earnest and scholarly evangelicals into the wider world, as they moved out of high-brow prophecy conferences on the Powerscourt estate to develop strategies for international mission that took some of their number as far away as India. In The Americanization of the apocalypse, Akenson follows Darby's ideas on their journey into North America, where, he argues, building on Ernest R. Sandeen's ground-breaking but often overlooked work, The roots of fundamentalism: British and American millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970), they contributed to the most religiously and politically consequential reformation of Protestant ideas. Readers might wonder why Irish Historical Studies should carry a review of a book that foregrounds American contexts in both title and subtitle. The rationale might be that, in this outstanding volume, Akenson turns a history of religious ideas into a story of Irish migration — and uses that story of migration to rewrite the history of Protestant fundamentalism.

It is this re-framing of its subject that makes The Americanization of the apocalypse such an important contribution to the field. Situating the arrival of Darby and his peers in the Great Lakes region, Akenson documents the lines of communication that were available to brethren preachers and theologians, and the means by which their ideas could circulate in modified forms. Some of this discussion develops in significant ways the conclusions of Akenson's earlier contributions. While his earlier volumes proposed Darby's commitment to a seven-fold division of redemptive history, The Americanization of the apocalypse shows how Darby abandoned that concept — and how, nevertheless, it circulated to become established as an evangelical orthodoxy and a core concept in the theological system that was attributed to Darby, and, thirty years after his death, became known as ‘dispensationalism’. For, it turns out, the popularising of ‘dispensationalism’ had little to do with Darby and a great deal to do with other preachers who were adapting his ideas in quite different social and ecclesiastical contexts, cherry-picking his ideas to find the novelties that would sustain the rapidly expanding culture of evangelical print.

Brethren were careless about copyright, Akenson explains, which meant that their works were not often deposited in copyright libraries and that their ideas were recycled and even reprinted with little or no reference to their author. Yet, it was brethren who made possible the reformulation of Darby's ideas, and their distribution in Protestant religious cultures on an extraordinary scale. For, as the title of Akenson's book puts it, Darby's ideas were ‘Americanized’. Adopted and popularised by the celebrity preacher D. L. Moody, these ideas were contracted and adapted by Moody's disciple, C. I. Scofield, and represented in the annotations of the reference bible that Scofield edited. It was Henry Frowde, Plymouth Brother and publisher at Oxford University Press, who contracted Scofield's work, which appeared in 1909 and by the end of the 1920s had become the first Oxford title to sell one million copies. Its sensational success warrants its description in Akenson's subtitle as ‘America's bible’. For it was Scofield — not Darby — who set the terms of what became known as ‘dispensationalism’. Akenson's revisionist argument has much to recommend it, including the fact that major brethren publications continued to advocate for something other than Scofield's dispensational system: the bible dictionary that was published by Morrish, in 1902, and which became a staple of brethren literary culture, advocated for the existence of only three dispensations — these relating to the calling of the Jews, the creation of the church and the inauguration of the millennium.

Akenson's attitude to his subjects is not always obscured: he describes Darby and his companions as ‘massive egoists’ and argues that ‘Darby for his entire career was incapable of apology or of admitting more than the smallest mistake’ (p. 17) — which is hardly the case, and never less so than in the final years of his life, during which he seriously considered leaving the brethren movement altogether. But Akenson is always enjoying himself — and when he describes the ‘wee conventicles, where calloused-handed labourers and wild-eyed pastors gyred around the phosphorescent imagery of the book of Revelation’ (p. 28), it is evident that he feels entirely at home.